Forbes columnist Steven Salzberg and author-investigator Joe Nickell will each be awarded the 2012 Robert P. Balles Prize in Critical Thinking, to be presented by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry at the CFI Summit in October.

Geronimo’s Hair

Most Americans have heard of the Navajo code talkers who served in the Vietnam War and have a general notion of their contribution to the war effort: a
nearly unintelligible and seemingly unbreakable encrypted language. However, there is another story seeping its way into networks of information—an account that would seem to correlate with Native American beliefs on the surface but would ultimately reveal more about the author of the article
than it would about Native Amer­icans and government conspiracies.

Signs of the Times (www.sott.net) was created by historian and author Laura Knight-Jadczyk. The About section on the site mentions that her husband is “one of the world’s few living
experts in hyperdimensional [HD] physics” (Knight-Jadczyk 2002). Another notable person that claims to be an “expert” in hyperdimensional physics is
Richard “Face on Mars” Hoag­land. HD physics has been associated with energies at the “mysterious” Coral Castle in Florida and Comet Elenin, and it has
even been linked to the Mayan Calendar (Scott 2011). The network page QuantumFuture.net lists Cassiopaea.org, Cassiopaea.com, and QuantumFuture.net as separate websites founded by Arkadiusz Jadczyk and his wife (Jadczyk and Knight-Jadczyk
2000).

In 2011, Signs of the Times featured an intriguing article under the category “Science of the Spirit” titled “The Truth about Hair and Why Indians Would
Keep Their Hair Long.” The author, C. Young, sets the tone of things to follow: “Our culture leads us to believe that hair style is a matter of personal
preference, that hair is a matter of fashion and/or convenience, and that how people wear their hair is simply a cosmetic issue” (Young 2011). However,
just a little further along in the article, another more interesting claim pops up: “Back in the Vietnam War however, an en­tirely different picture
emerged, one that has been carefully covered up and hidden from public view.”

This particular story involves an account from a woman going by the name of Sally (to protect her privacy) who reported a shocking discovery made by her
husband while he was working at a VA Medical hospital as a “licensed psychologist.” Sally is quoted in the article:

I remember clearly an evening when my husband came back to our apartment on Doctor’s Circle carrying a thick official looking folder. Inside were hundreds
of pages of certain studies commissioned by the government. He was in shock from those contents. What he read in those documents completely changed his
life. From that moment on my conservative middle of the road husband grew his hair and beard and never cut them again. What is more, the VA Medical center
let him do it, and other very conservative men in his staff followed his example.

According to the author, the contents supposedly contained details about special departments being sent undercover to infiltrate Native American
reservations in an attempt to recruit young scouts who ap­peared to have “almost supernatural” abilities. It also allegedly mentioned that these men were
“. . . extensively documented as experts in tracking and survival.” However, much to the dismay of the military re­cruiters, “Once enlisted, an amazing
thing happened. Whatever talents and skills they had possessed on the reservation seemed to mysteriously disappear, as recruit after recruit failed to
perform as expected in the field” (Young 2011).

This was said to have been followed by a government-led investigation into what could cause such a drastic reduction in performance. The investigators’
findings are presented in the following quote from Young’s article: “When questioned about their failure to perform as expected, the older recruits replied
consistently that when they received their required military haircuts, they could no longer ‘sense’ the enemy, they could no longer access a ‘sixth sense,’
their ‘intuition’ no longer was reliable, they couldn’t ‘read’ subtle signs as well or access subtle extrasensory information.”

More trackers were recruited in order to carry out further testing. This time, men who received similar scores were tested in pairs; one of them got a
military haircut and the other kept the more traditional longer hair length. When these changes were put into effect, the testing resumed and “time after
time the man with long hair kept making high scores. Time after time, the man with the short hair failed the tests in which he had previously scored high
scores.”

If there is any doubt as to what is going on here, the author of the article provides an example of some typical tests. One scenario describes a recruit
sleeping outside in the wilderness who would suddenly wake up before anyone approached within earshot. Another example involves an attack situation where
the recruit “pretending to be sleeping” would turn things around and subdue the potential assailant. After this series of tests, a military haircut was
administered, and the recruit would start to fail “many other tests that he had previously passed. . . .” In the end, the government “recommended that all
Indian trackers be exempt from military haircuts. In fact, it required that trackers keep their hair long,” according to Young.

Close investigation into various tribal beliefs might help explain the origin of this story. Though Native American legends and belief systems do
incorporate terms for the supernatural, they do not use phrases found in New Age mysticism like “aura” or “sixth sense.” The aspects surrounding the long
hair of Native American boys and men cannot be accurately understood without in­sight from a part of American history that might not be as widely known.
While there might be some variability in the details re­garding the reasons for long hair from tribe to tribe, there is one major component that has
remained consistent: long hair has never been about aesthetics but instead is a religious concern. Generally, long hair has strong religious implications
based on tribal beliefs that often go unnoticed, but it is commonly more known to be associated with a connection to the ancestors; severing it symbolizes
the mourning of a close loved one or family member.

During the early periods of America’s history, Native Americans were subjected to a conversion process administered by the United States government. The
religious be­liefs of the government agents and other missionaries led them to consider long hair offensive, simply labeling Native American religions to
be un-Christian. The aspect of this government program that makes it an infamous part in Native American history is the notion of using boarding schools to
systematically remove tribal cultures and traditions from the lives of young Native people in an attempt to “civilize” them. During this time, phrases like
“Kill the Indian and save the man” and “The only good Indian is a dead one” (Pratt 1892) became quite popular and were ultimately adopted as slogans by the
federal government.

Most of the struggles that Native Amer­icans face seem to come from the fact that their spiritual beliefs are not recognized as a legitimate religion. Not
only is this reflected in society, but it also floods over the walls of institutions and into the system itself. Most recently, the Fifth Circuit Court of
Appeals upheld a ruling in the case A.A. ex rel. Beten­baugh v. Needville Independent School District, which involved a young Lipan Apache boy attending
kindergarten in Texas. A trial court originally settled in favor of the parents, but the school district appealed the ruling. The Circuit judges’ ruling
appears in the official document filed in the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals as follows: “A Native Amer­ican boy and his parents challenge a school
district’s requirement that he wear his long hair in a bun on top of his head or in a braid tucked in his shirt. We agree with the district court that the
requirement offends a sincere religious belief and hold it invalid under Texas law” (U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit 2010). Accord­ing to
tribal historian Nancy Minor, many considered this a “. . . victory for the Lipan Apache Tribe of Texas, since it validates the fact that we are a
legitimate American Indian tribe with members who practice traditional beliefs” (Minor 2010).

C. Young also claims that “Hair is an extension of the nervous system, it can be correctly seen as exteriorized nerves, a type of highly evolved ‘feelers’
or ‘antennae’ that transmit vast amounts of important information to the brain stem, the limbic system, and the neocortex” (Young 2011). However, this does
not fit the description of what hair is according to Hairbiology.com (2012), an informative website that is solely dedicated to helping explain the biology
of hair. There is mention of hair being used for everything from trapping heat to protecting the scalp from ultraviolet light from the sun and even
providing “. . . tactile information about the environment.” There is actually a variety of different types of mammalian hair, but human does not fit the
antennae description. While the hair that grows on a person’s head might provide some sensory input, it functions more like cat whiskers than insect
antennae. Even in this case, the whiskers of a cat are not really doing the feeling; it is in the follicles below the whiskers where most of the sensing is
occurring. In fact, Robert Kunzig’s (2002) article in Discover magazine, “The Biology of . . . Hair: Zeroing in on the Molecular Switches That Regenerate
Hair Growth,” tells us that “The hair we see, fuss over, curse, write lyrics about, is just dead stuff, pushed up and out of the skin by the follicles
below. It is those follicles that are alive, and that drive the growth and shedding we see.”

Not only are there many holes in the presented account of the government using Native Americans in special experimental research, but also records
pertaining to the special tracker units seem to be missing. The only source that appears associated with this account comes from United Truth Seekers, a
website that promotes itself as “A ‘SOCIAL NETWORK’ & Was Created To: Expose The New World Order! Join Us Exposing The Evil New World Order!” (Suggs
2012).

However, the Signs of the Times site also has another conspiracy-tinged statement providing insight into the perspective shared by its contributors: “Our
work has been attacked, suppressed, and marginalized by the Powers That Be in ways that no other work has been, leaving us with the distinct impression
that we must be on the right track!” (Knight-Jadczyk 2002).

Laura Knight-Jadczyk also makes another revealing statement by highlighting the point that her website “. . . stands out from the crowd . . . for its
commentary on world events and tracking of global trends, patterns, and energies” (Knight-Jadczyk 2002). While the author and the website presenting the
article both seem to show a genuine interest in science, there is a serious lack of the necessary critical thinking skills needed to effectively engage
these specific subjects. For example, the following is the logic that Young offers as explanation for unique qualities of hair: “Not only does hair in
people, include[ing] facial hair in men, provide an information highway reaching the brain, hair also emits energy, the electromagnetic energy emitted by
the brain into the outer environment. This has been seen in Kirlian photography when a person is photographed with long hair and then rephotographed after
the hair is cut” (Young 2011).

For those unfamiliar with Kirlian photography, or electrophotography, it involves fun with some conductive material and an electrode (Carroll 2010).
Photo­graphing the corona discharge produces an impressive effect and array of streaking colors that some people allege is the depiction of the “human
energy field” commonly referred to as the body’s “aura” (Barrett 2001). It is pure pseudoscience.

The following is another indication that this entire account of Native American “trackers” being used in any research resembling the sort mentioned is more
than likely completely fabricated: “SOTT can’t confirm this story or the research it suggests took place, however, we have wondered on many occasions, what
is the use of hair and why so many legends refer to hair as being a source of strength, from Samson, to Nazarenes, to the long haired Franks” (Young 2011).

In the end, Young finally manages to make one reasonable statement stick out through this aura of mystical energy and pseudoscience: “In searching for
solutions for the distress in our world, it may be time for us to consider that many of our most basic assumptions about reality are in error. It may be
that a major part of the solution is looking at us in the face each morning when we see ourselves in the mirror.”

Noah Nez

Noah Nez is a Native American skeptic living in Arizona; he is a member of the Phoenix Area Skeptics Society (PASS) and author of Native Skeptic, a blog that looks at critical thinking from a Native American perspective.

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